“Reflecting on our practice also provides us with the substance of our stories.” —-Kathleen Bailey Vignette 1: February 10, 2014 It’s one week before the big final exams. I’ve instructed the stud...

Shona Whyte's insight:

Interesting discussion with three concrete examples of EFL class events, links to Kathleen Bailey's 1997 article available http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ajelt/vol7/art1.htm and reference to Fanselow (who talks a lot of sense on this topic in my view).

I'm not finding anything (new) directly relevant to teacher education for languages with technology, and I'm tempted to carp about echo chamber effects and this sort of limited open access, but full text is available ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4113UuBTio As much as any contemporary writer of literary fiction ever does, Junot Díaz has become something of a household name in the years since his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao appeared in...

Shona Whyte's insight:

Reading, listening practice on literary topics. For my Masters in Teaching English students.

The full title of this webinar - The Melody of English: Research and Resources for Teaching the Pragmatic Functions of Intonation - is a real mouthful and it was the very first PronSIG event that I...

Shona Whyte's insight:

Clear and well-structured overview by Adi Rajan of a webinar by Marnie Reed and Tamara Jones, including rationale for teaching intonation in English plus teaching activities and an up-to-date reference list.

"I suspect that some Southerners might recognize that he doesn't sound quite right," Dr. Erik Thomas, a professor of linguistics at North Carolina State University told me. Thomas has studied Southern American English since his undergraduate years and is considered one of the pre-eminent experts on Southern accents. "The average person might not hear the difference," he added.

This talk was by Katherine Bilsborough and she started off by stating that while the downloading of illegally shared materials is a problem, there’s also a dire need for good quality materials because a lot of the stuff on the net is terribly dodgy. Additionally, there’s tremendous interest in materials writing because in a sense it is a form of professional development and requires Ts to bring together and apply a range of skills

The first international research days (IRDs) on Social Media and CMC Corpora for the eHumanities will be held in Rennes, France on 23-24th October 2015 and will focus on communication and interactions stemming from networks such as the Internet or telecommunications, as well as mono and multimodal, synchronous and asynchronous communications. The focus of the IRC will encompasses different CMC genres. These include, but are not limited to, discussion forums, email, SMS, text chat, wiki discussions, discussions in multimodal and/or 3D environments.

According to the ILH, tasks with a higher involvement load are considered to be more effective for word learning and retention than tasks with lower involvement loads. For comparison purposes, each task is assigned a specific number which relates to an involvement load index. Total absence of a factor is assigned 0, a moderate presence is assigned 1 and strong presence is assigned a score of 2.

SEARCH (0) Absent: Meaning or translation of word is provided. (1) Present: Learner must look up meaning / translation of a word.

EVALUATION (0) Absent: Words are not compared with other words. (1) Moderate: Words are compared to other words in provided contexts. (2) Strong: Words are compared to other words in self-created contexts.

For example, if a teacher provides students with some new words and their definitions and asks students to create original sentences with them, the task would be assigned the following involvement load score: Need: Moderate, (1): the assignment is imposed by the teacher. Search: Absent (0): the definitions are provided. Evaluation: (2) High: the students need to write their own original sentences. Total Score: 3

The results of the test found that retention of the new vocabulary directly correlated with involvement load. Participants who had completed tasks with the lowest involvement load scored lowest and those who had completed tasks with the highest involvement load scored highest. This provides evidence in support of the ILH.

Farrell: ""teachers who do not bother to reflect on their work become slaves to routine and their actions are guided mostly by impulse, tradition and/or authority rather than by informed decision making."

Shona Whyte's insight:

Chapter 1 is open access - I like the start already, since it helps justify my position on action research for pre-service language teachers

This week our school is on a break due to the Feria holiday here in Krakow. After contemplating going to visit friend and traveling, I decided that what would actually be the best use of my time was to take up some intensive Polish lessons and raise my level and integrate better in this country. …

Shona Whyte's insight:

An EFL teacher experiences two different teaching approaches in an intensive Polish course.

I’ve just read Peter Yongqi Gu (2003)Vocabulary Learning in a Second Language: Person, Task, Context and Strategies Here are a few interesting points which emerge. All references can be found at th...

Shona Whyte's insight:

Old-fashioned dictionary work, memorisation of translation pairs still have their place, research shows. But other activities (and more research) are needed to go beyond word recognition to appropriate use.

The results of a comprehensive MLA survey of language course enrollments in United States colleges and universities are now available on the MLA Web site. According to Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013, while aggregate enrollments in languages other than English have decreased since the MLA’s last survey in 2009, several languages saw increasing enrollments, and particularly growth in enrollments in advanced language classes.

Geoff Jordan: "[In] most English language teaching […] students are led through units of a coursebook, spending much of the time working on isolated linguistic structures and carefully-controlled vocabulary in a sequence which is externally predetermined and imposed on them by the textbook writer.

BUT

Research suggests that interlanguage development progresses in stages and that it’s impossible to alter stage order or to make learners skip stages. Thus, teachability is constrained by learnability and any coursebook-driven syllabus which attempts to impose an external linguistic syllabus on learners is futile: learning happens in spite of and not because of the course design.

Futile because

[According to Mike Long] : "Controlling grammar, vocabulary and sentence length results in a limited source of target-language use upon which learners must rely in order to learn the code. The often tiny samples are worked and reworked in class, whether practiced until rote-memorized, milked meta-linguistically, or both, and learners are expected to learn the full language on the basis of access to such limited data”.

Shona Whyte's insight:

I just reblogged this; it's worth following the links in the original post, and taking a look round Jordan's blog for further arguments.

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